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Journey to the West
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Many accounts of Tsai Ming-liang’s work make it sound rigidly schematic and
systematic: all static shots, all in long takes! Journey to the West – the second entry
in the Walker series featuring Lee
Kang-sheng as an ultra-slow-moving monk – shows up
the fallacy of such reductive caricature (however well-intentioned it may be as
a tribute to the director’s rigour).
Tsai and his
cinematographers pan when they have to or want to (as, for instance, when they
follow Lee down a long flight of stairs in Journey);
and the duration of images can last anywhere from under a minute to 14 minutes
(as in the already notorious penultimate shot of Stray Dogs),
in no clear or predictable pattern of alternation. In fact, his style, within
its pre-set parameters, is remarkably flexible.
Journey
to the West also plays with the hint or shadow of a narrative – but without the same
gravity as in Stray Dogs. Lee and Denis Lavant seem to begin (judging from the overlapping soundtrack) in the same cave or
womb-like interior space. As Lee moves up the stairs and out into the world –
like in the performance art that Alejando Jodorowsky performed in his Chilean youth, one must keep
walking forward, no matter what! – Lavant appears (in
the film’s fourth shot) to be dreaming the monk’s presence, far in the hilly
background.
Eventually, Lavant pops up on the crowded streets of Marseille,
following his Master and proving for us – as Chaplin and Keaton once did – that
exact mimicry is among comedy’s greatest and most enduring mechanisms.
Journey is, in its own terms, a
perfect Tsai work, a small gem. It mixes both a species of hyper-realism –
precisely documenting, as in a Straub-Huillet film,
the movement of light or the sound of the wind – and a sense of surrealist
marvel, as in the shot of a Museum roof reflection flipped upside-down, thus
suggesting that the sky begins, at ground level, where a body of water is
abruptly bisected.
No matter what is happening
in or to the image, however, everyday life keeps streaming by: people walk on,
oblivious, or gawk for a moment at the performers or the camera. Tsai (after
judicious editing) accepts all the fluctuations, all the accidents. It is his
Zen wisdom at its most paradoxical height, as in his earlier video A Conversation with God (2001): some measure
of serenity is found at the heart of a truly chaotic, messed-up, urban world.
Although Tsai has announced that Stray Dogs will be his last work for cinema, in order to concentrate more on gallery pieces and virtual reality experiments, perhaps the comparative success, on the specialist circuits, of it and Journey to the West (they have since been coupled on DVD) will convince him to keep moving on, into the unknown. MORE Tsai: What Time Is It There?, The River, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, The Hole © Adrian Martin April 2015 |
